Education in Post-Colonial Ghana : Teachers, Schools & Bureaucracy

The prospect of redistributing power from central government offices to local actors and organisations has repeatedly tantalised academics, politicians and policy makers promulgating decentralisation measures in hopes that such action would cure the social and economic ills faced by their policies. Education planners in Accra regarded decentralisation as an important strategy for raising the quality and status of Ghanian education. The Ministry of Education (MOE) was depending on the local content curriculum (LCC) to achieve many things. As MOE officials observed, however, the success or failure of the reform essentially depended on the actions of classroom teachers. Even if plans for the reform were carefully designed and communicated by experts in Accra, goals for the reform would not be met unless teachers implemented the reform as envisioned by its authors. When the Ghanian government enacted the LCC reform it was depending on classroom teachers to take a leading role in the process of educational decentralisation. The one goal that all members of the system appeared to have most thoroughly absorbed was the notion that as a result of the changes outlined in LCC policy documents, the curriculum in Ghanian schools should more closely mesh with local conditions. St. Aquinas junior high school, a private Catholic institution was the only school I visited where teachers were willing to question and modify policies created in Accra. Rather than obediently follow instructions from Accra, St. Aquinas employees reshaped MOE policies to meet their own educational philosophies and objectives. My research indicates that the MOE has not yet commenced to rebuild the culture of education to fit the new vision of teaching and learning it is promoting. Instead, it is attempting to append the LCC reform to an existing core, with only minor modifications.